This talk is an attempt to shift the discourse around
networks from the Internet specifically and extend into the complex web of
technologically mediated social networks. That is the reason for this
first slide of an elaborate pattern of Los Angeles freeways – a picture of
a 20th century transportation system that defies any logic. In
relation to Paris, there could not be a more different city space – Los
Angeles is a vast, decentralized, architecturally non-coherent city, with
a habit of erasing history. What we all share, whether in Paris or Los
Angeles, is how more and more a lot of us extend our social network with
technology, in our pockets. For instance, how many people here have a cell
phone? Can you please raise your phones and turn them on? (Two thirds of
the audience raises their arms with cell phones in their hands). If
compelled to answer your phone while I am talking, do not hesitate. I will
not take it personally. Indeed, I may have a call coming in later in my
talk.

Background

Before I go further into the cellular systems of our
communication networks, I think it is important to give you a little
background of my work in the last few years. My investigation into social
networks online began with a piece that I started in 1996 and pretty much
completed by 1999, although the work is still online and actively growing.
Even today someone created a body.

Upon entering the main site, participants are invited to
create their own bodies and become "members." They have a choice of twelve
textures with attached meanings, which are a combination of alchemical
properties and marketing strategies. The body parts are female, male, and
infantile, left and right leg and arms, torso and head. The body
themselves are wire frames that are 3-dimensional scans that are used for
medical imaging. There are also twelve sounds to be attached to the body
that can be viewed as an image as well. Although this work was completed
in 1999, bodies are generated practically every day. I rarely go to the
site, but each time I do, I am always surprised to find still more new
bodies created. With this project came my fascination with the idea of a
project that continues to change and grow without supervision of the
artist. I now plan projects that have an open-ended architecture and no
definitive end.

During the active phase that lasted from 1996-1999, much
of the project was developed in response to the audience demands. The best
example of this is ‘necropolis’ which emerged out of a demand from people
to delete the bodies they created. In response to one member who
threatened to sue unless his body was deleted, Necropolis was constructed.
There are many different methods of death taken from the crime archives on
the Internet, participants have to choose a method, write an obit, and
construct a grave.

In the interest of time, I will not go into this project
too much longer, but I do want to mention that the last, intriguing demand
was for establishing a ‘community’. I started researching online
communities and wondered about the meaning of this. I realized that
because of my own busy schedule, it was really difficult, even for me, to
find the time to spend in these online spaces. All my colleagues and
friends were equally busy and not able to participate, no matter how
fascinated by the concept. This led me to think about time, or lack of,
due to technology that was designed to save us time. I was also interested
in exploring other ways to visualize the online body and started exploring
ideas of networks beyond the Internet. At this time I became fascinated
with tensegrity structures that were used by Kenneth Snelson in sculpture,
Buckminster Fuller in architecture, and explored in relation to the human
body by Donald Ingber [2].

I wondered if these same systems can be used in designing
information spaces, and in my search on the Web discovered a programmer,
Gerald de Jong, who was doing exactly that. When invited to do a site
specific piece for an old mine in Germany, I decided to explore some of
these ideas together with Gerald. We started working remotely and met only
when the show was opening, which was an entirely new way of collaborating
for me. The piece that resulted was Datamining Bodies This
work was site specific and the first to explore ways to represent the
human body online as an energetic geometry, and living database
persona.[3]

n0time: Building a community of people with no
time

Still thinking of networks, online communities and our
relationship to time and technology, I continued to develop a concept that
would actively engage the audience in a different time mode, depending on
whether they occupied the physical or information spaces. Although I
firmly believe that there is no separation between the virtual and the
physical, I also recognize that these spaces create a very different
experience of time, and ultimately believe that there is no time. There is
only constant change. The constructed time we live in is not working very
well for us at this point, as is seen by the number of stressed out
individuals that do not exclude you and me. We have moved away too far
from any biological / analog measurements of change to nanoseconds, and
are overwhelmed with information, processed much faster than we ever are
built to absorb.

As our bodies are reduced to large data-sets, we are
entering into an entirely different age and need to start rebelling
against the industrial / product(ive) time. Whether digital technologies
can help us solve some of those mysteries is an open question. The project
that explored these issues was called n0time (Building a Community
of People with No Time). The physical installation was a
collaboration with Gerald once again, along with David Beaudry and
sculptor, Tim Quinn. Once again, as in virtual concrete, I found that the
physical piece worked, but was not quite satisfied with the online aspect.
Eventually it was reduce to a screensaver that would evolve while people
were away from their desk. The information body would evolve in seconds,
minutes, hours, months or years and in 1000 increments would explode from
too much information. This is then sent to the entire n0time
community. Having no time is transformed to n(space) zero time.

Cellular trans_Actions

I began to experiment giving lectures about
n0time while asking everyone to keep their cell phones on,
as I did here at the beginning of this lecture. After experimenting with
audiences at SIGGRAPH and the American Film Institute (AFI) last August, I
created my first installation at the Edith Russ Media Haus in Oldenburg. I
very quickly developed a piece as a response to September 11th,
the day I arrived to Germany and my attention shifted to the importance of
human voice and emotion, language and the influence of geographic
proximity. I asked the audience to talk to each other about the tragedy in
NY and eventually was completely cut off from the conversation. I consider
the performance a success if I become irrelevant and can move away from
the stage. (Roy Ascott’s cell phone rings and he hands it to me. It is
Andreas Broekmann who had to leave early and wanted to connect to the
talk. I try to continue the lecture while talking to Andreas too, but
eventually have to tell him that I have to go. The timing of his call was
uncanny. He rang just as I was talking about cellular networks! I am sure
many thought it was planned ahead. It wasn’t. I try to carry on a
conversation while talking, but eventually have to apologize and cut the
call.)

I continued the project in Los Angeles by asking people
with different backgrounds to leave a message about this tragic event in
their native language. Recently I performed this work in San Francisco at
an alternative space, the Lab. Phone numbers were collected and
redistributed randomly to the audience asking them to call each other.
Everything was going wrong with technology, all the power went down and
when everyone started using their phones, the satellite system jammed too.
After the event, I ended up with a list of cell phone numbers from the
audience and I decided to extend the performance in time by calling after
the fact and making a direct connection to people who were participating.
A few people I called thought that the power outage and cellular jamming
was planned as part of the performance!

I find cell phones interesting for a number of reasons,
the first being that they really enact the decentralization of our
communication networks and have a profound effect on our social
interaction -- public and private spaces truly blur. But most of all, I am
fascinated by the fact that the cell phone technological infrastructure is
based on dividing our cities into hexagons – the shape that repeatedly
shows up in nature – from beehives to molecules. The reason of course is
not philosophical but simply because it is the most efficient system. [5]

zero@wavefunction : nano dreams &
nightmares

Hexagons first fascinated me while studying Buckminster
Fuller’s structures, which led me to the story of the discovery of the c60
carbon molecule that was named the buckminsterfullerene.

Exploring issues of time in relation to human networks
and our bodies as elaborate networks has naturally shifter my attention to
the molecular level. Working with tensegrity made me think more in terms
of emerging patterns in nature -- no matter how alienated we may become,
we produce patterns that mirror the natural world. My work focused on
making these far reaching connections between the social structures we
unconsciously build and the ones that are inherently the building blocks
of nature. Making the invisible traces of our connectivity and mirroring
of nature visible is my long-term goal. Issues raised by such work are
deeply philosophical and challenging, as they require us to reconsider our
world and make significant shifts in our consciousness.

This work is a result of a sustained dialogue and work
with a well-known nano scientist, Jim Gimzewski. [6]
We are both interested in asking deeper, philosophical questions, no
matter how difficult and uncomfortable they may be. And we agree that
there needs to emerge something in between art and science – a new, third
culture and this is what we are exploring together.

When we first started talking, I felt that it would be
important to have Jim’s lab accessible to the general public and he
immediately responded to the idea and understood the reasoning. So we set
up a series of video cameras -- one looking at his STM (scanning tunneling
microscope), one seeing the molecules researchers look at and manipulate;
one looking outside the window of Jim’s office and one at in the hallway
connecting the two labs he works in. Additionally we are planning to put
cameras in the locations of the future California NanoSystems Institute
(CNSI) buildings at UCLA and UCSB. All these cameras stream video live on
the Internet, making it possible for anyone, anywhere, to enter this
privileged and frequently mystified and misunderstood world. In fact, nano
science is at the beginning stages of research and much of the work is
daily, persistent search for data by trying many different possibilities.

With zerowave, I wanted to stress scale and
have the molecules projected on a monumental level, again to make the idea
of manipulating the building blocks of nature accessible and not
intimidating. Although I had easy access to visualizations and data, I
decided it would be much more effective to work metaphorically but still
base it on the actual behavior of buckyballs. Jim worked closely with Josh
Nimoy, a recent graduate from our department who is a true software
artist, to explain the behavior of molecules when he works with them. The
projection is meant to connect the viewer to the idea of working on a
molecular level, from a human point of view. Our shadows are those that
move the molecules and manipulate their shapes… We can influence behavior
from a distance, with an immaterial shadow of our physical body. The next
step is to immerse ourselves in the dreams and nightmares we project on
this emerging science.

I believe that we live in an exciting time that is filled
with danger and urgency. For artists working with emerging technologies,
engaging social and cultural issues raised by the amazing innovations in
science, this is a particularly challenging time. We have always played a
role in introducing the general public to new ideas and helped shift the
accepted perception of our collective reality. With so many huge paradigm
shifts being introduced by scientific innovation at such speed, it is more
important than ever for artists to envision possibilities, pose difficult
questions and help understand the deeper meaning of these innovations.